


capture the sun

by MashpotatoeQueen5



Category: The Mysterious Benedict Society - Trenton Lee Stewart
Genre: Angst, Childhood Trauma, Circus, Crying, Dreams and Nightmares, Families of Choice, Family Feels, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Growing Up, Harm to Children, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Kindness, Love, Male-Female Friendship, Minor Injuries, Nightmares, Orphanage, Platonic Relationships, Swimming, Team as Family, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:47:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27906205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MashpotatoeQueen5/pseuds/MashpotatoeQueen5
Summary: Kate has been running all the days of her life.(Or, Kate grows up, and it isn't easy, but she finds her way.)
Relationships: Constance Contraire & Kate Wetherall, Milligan & Kate Wetherall, Reynie Muldoon & Kate Wetherall, Sticky Washington & Kate Wetherall
Comments: 24
Kudos: 44





	capture the sun

**Author's Note:**

> For pumpkinthistle <3

Kate grows up running.

There's open space, in the yard, perfect for small bare feet and child's laughter. She sprints down that great expanse, the grass whipping past her, the wind ruffling her hair. It feels like freedom. It feels like light.

Two strong arms swoop her up into open air, and she throws her hands wide and tries to catch the sun.

"Again," she cries, "again!" 

Laughter, warm and echoing. Her father’s face is all scarred tan and brilliant smile. He throws her into the air once more and she's a bird, soaring far and great into the unknown.

At her request, he spins her around in tight circles, sets her down giggling and dizzy, tripping over her own two feet before he steadies her, his own low chuckles mingling with her own loud, boisterous ones. 

Then she takes off, flyaway blonde strands sticking out in tuffs and the sunlight painting her skin golden. There is an entire world at her feet, an endless horizon stretching out before her. 

Kate is three years old. She is all small skin and small bones. 

She feels like a giant. She feels like the sun is a spotlight, shining down directly on her, the world but some clay to be molded by her own clumsy fingers. 

"Daddy," she calls, breathless and alive, "can we go to the mill? I wanna swim."

He places her on his shoulders. The molten gold of the day dipping into dusk is warm against her back.

"Of course we can, Katie Cat," he says, and she knocks her feet against his chest, and she is happy.

Kate cries when she's first brought to the orphanage.

She misses her dad. She misses her dad _ so much,  _ and Kate refuses to let anyone even consider her for adoption because  _ he's going to be back, any day now, he'll be here. _

But a month passes. Then two. Then three. 

No one comes.

She cries herself to sleep and she cries during meals and she cries during playtime. She cries until the tears run out and she's left empty and quiet and, for the first time, feeling very, very small.

The other girls complain about the noise and shoot her dirty looks. Kate grieves until her small body overfills with it, until she can hardly breathe around it.

He still doesn't come.

And finally, finally, after three months of helpless sadness Kate finally thinks,  _ enough, enough _ , and turns that grief to anger. 

Her father abandoned her. This is not a fairytale, where the great evil is defeated and everyone gets to go home and be eternally happy. This is the truth. This is  _ life. _ She carries it in the palms of her hands and plants it inside her chest.

Kate doesn’t get to win. Not this time.

“He’s only departed, dearie,” says one of the tenders. Her eyes look distant, distracted, “No real reason to worry.”

Kate wants to _ scream. _

She wants to weep.

But she refuses to waste her emotions on him. She will not spill this aching kind of love for a man who left her and did not look back. 

The anger inside of her stays, though, no matter how hard she tries. It curls somewhere low in her chest and simmers.

Kate learns how to breathe around it. Lungs inflate and deflate, the air stuffy in the crammed dormitory, loud with the other girls' snores and sleepy snuffles. Her pillow is wet with her tears and she flips it to the dry side, tries to find a new place to start in the creases.

* * *

_ "Did you know," Sticky says, "that anger is a secondary emotion?" _

_ Kate throws herself into a handspring and lands in a bridge, only to climb back up her own legs until she's standing again. The backyard stretches on before her and she starts cartwheeling, eating up the long expanse of grass in moments.  _

_ She’s trying to burn off excessive adrenaline, her latest argument with Milligan ringing in her mind. Storming off never feels as good as she wants it too, never gets rid of her fiery temper, just leaves it clogged up around her head. _

_ "Oh?" she responds, keeping her tone purposely breezy and light, and flips into a handstand. Behind her, unseen, Sticky gives her a considering look. _

_ "Yes. Anger never starts as just anger- it starts as something else. Fear, pain, embarrassment… grief." _

_ The air seems to leave her lungs. She fumbles, topples backwards in a controlled fall, the grass tickling her cheek, scratching at her bare arms. _

_ "Oh." _

_ It slips out too quietly, and she confronts the bizarre urge to laugh, to burst into the air and do jumping jacks, to run a million miles away. Anything to distract from that escaped breath of sound that hangs heavy between them, that almost silence that wasn't. _

_ But she doesn't. She stays. She looks up at the sky and watches the clouds roll pass. The person who she was when she was younger would have already been long, long gone. _

_ Sticky shifts, stands, and doesn't comment. He walks across the yard and sits cross legged by Kate's side, a heavy book settled in his lap.  _

_ Without a word, he starts plucking blades of grass and sprinkling them down on her face. The smell catches in her nose. It reminds her to breathe. _

_ Kate closes her eyes. _

* * *

The first time the older girls at the orphanage find her outside during freetime and ask her if she wants to play, she's ecstatic. The TV and radio leave her shoulders hunching up to her chin, prickly little messages in her brain ringing  _ Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!  _ with every burst of static. She's taken to sneaking out to the backyard: even as crummy as it is, it’s better than being stuck inside. She practices clumsy cartwheels and unsteady handstands, spins round and round in a dance of her own making.

And it's fun. It really is. But it can also get lonely.

Which is why she's so excited when they ask her if she wants to join them in their game of cat and mouse, because she had thought they hadn't liked her all that much, always ignoring her and shooting her irritated looks. 

_ Cat and mouse,  _ they say, with smiles like oil,  _ and you're the mouse _ .

Kate agrees blithely, naively, jumps on her toes and takes off with determination, something like joy brightening up inside of her for the first time in a while.

She runs and pictures herself a stallion, racing across an open plain. She imagines herself eating up the miles with every steady stride.

And finally, when she is out of breath and full of giggles, she pulls to an ungraceful stop, turns around smiling, and lets them catch her. It feels like winning, just for a moment. It feels like the sun is pooled in the palms of her hands.

Eyes full of malice, they descend.

"What are you gonna do, baby?" the oldest girl whispers in her ear, when she is pinned down and powerless, all small skin and small bones, "Cry?"

_ (We won, _ their voices jeer,  _ You lost.) _

Later, when Ms. Notting is going on and on with her drunken rant about how Kate needs to learn to play nice, to not ruin her clothes because replacing them is  _ expensive, _ about how she's such an ungrateful  _ brat,  _ she stands there and does not cry.

She won't give them the satisfaction.

She stands, fists curled and eyes on her shoes. Her shoulder feels like one big bruise from where they had shoved her to the ground. Her cheek smarts from where their nails had caught against soft flesh, leaving thin angry scratches.

Humiliated and angry and something bitter in her mouth, Kate bites her tongue and says nothing, seethes in her mind. Her eyes are wet and her mouth is dry, teeth pressing together until it’s painful, until it aches.

She let them catch her, but only once.

Never again.

She starts trying to get adopted. Mostly as a means of escape.

She's young, cute. She's got these bright blue eyes and this flyaway blonde hair curling around her shoulders. In looks, she has everything going for her.

But the potential parents who meet with her are always lost with what to do with her energy, her spirit. Kate has so much inside of her, so much she loves to share. She is a never ending firework piercing across the sky.

She's too much for them, is the problem. Some say it more politely than others-  _ what a precocious child _ \- and some less-  _ do you have any less….wild children? _

Small hands and small fingers, wiping at teary eyes until they stay dry as desert sands. She does not cry, but she holds her palms open, and wishes desperately for  _ someone _ to reach back.

But none of the parents ever express any real interest, and Kate grinds her teeth and breathes out slow and thinks  _ okay. _

_ Okay. _

_ I'll do it by myself. _

_ I don't need anyone but me. _

Kate grows up running away

"Come back here, _ freak!" _

She ducks her head down, turns round another corner. Her feet slam against worn planks of wood and echo, reverberating through the old building. 

She prefers to run barefoot. She can't remember why.

Knowing better than to expect anyone to check in on the commotion and come save her, she puts on another burst of speed, bouncing off a wall and then down the hallway.

Her hands smart from the hard slap against plaster, throbbing red and angry, but it's worth it to hear one of the older girls smack directly into the corner, unable to manage the tight turn.

She smirks, and- spotting her target- skids to her knees, rough denim across the scuffed floor. In seconds, she has the old grate of the ventilation shaft removed, and slips inside with hardly a sound, army crawling deeper into the metal tunnels as the other girls' angry shouts reverberate and ring in her ears.

_ Perfect _ . She just  _ knew  _ that her pursuers wouldn't be able to fit.

It's a vindicated kind of joy, this, it twists and curdles in her chest and is swallowed up by a bitter sort of anger. She carries it in the breadth of her small palms and feels its weight.

They hate her, here. All the older tenants at  _ Holly Notting's Orphanage For Girls _ hate her. They hate that she's loud, that she is always badgering for outside time and refuses to watch TV or listen to the radio, that she's younger than them and still faster with her schoolwork, even if she does it standing up or upside down.

And, well-

Ms. Notting is almost always drunk and the other caretakers can't bring themselves to actually care. 

_ All they are are takers,  _ Kate thinks,  _ they just take and take all the happiness in the world and replace it with boredom and stupidness. Care has nothing to do with it. _

She breathes.

This is not a world made for winning. She’s sure of it. What other reason could there be for it? This misery that follows her wherever she goes? Every day is a battle- a battle to avoid beatings and drunken rants, a battle to avoid her own boredom and perilous thoughts, a battle just to exist, sometimes- and it’s not one she can win. Not today. Not ever.

But she’s got her own small skin and her own small bones, and it’s not much but she makes it work. The world won’t let her win but she sure as anything isn’t going to let it make her  _ lose. _

She breathes and doesn't cry. Tears have never helped her, not a single day of her life.

If her smile is too sharp around its edges, sometimes, then let it be a warning.

Quietly, she slides deeper into the tunnels, her every shuffle magnified by the metal walls. Deeper in, the shaft widens and she can comfortably crawl on her hands and knees, which she does so with a practiced kind of air, weaving her way through the old building until she finds the central shaft, straight up and down.

Flexing her fingers, Kate starts to climb.

There’s a boarded up actic at the top of the orphanage, and she's made it a space all to her own, a safe haven no one else can reach. She's even taken to camping up here, because in the dormitory she’s far too much of a target to cruel pranks.

"The Great Kate Weather Machine," she whispers to herself, and imagines up a world of giants made out of the elements, towering typhoons and living avalanches, controlled by evil wizards. 

She's a knight, a hero. She's there to save the day, and the people love her.

And if sometimes the attic becomes too quiet and the air too hard to breathe, then it's no one's business but her own. Kate sits by the small circular window that looks out on a dingy neighborhood, the rickety train track vanishing over the hill, and tries to catch the setting sun between her small calloused palms.

The light slips from her fingers, disappears into nothing as the dark of the night swallows it whole. 

Kate watches it go.

* * *

She grows up here, in this broken house that might have been a home in a kinder life. The grownups grow more and more frustrated the longer she refuses to settle down and be quiet like she’s supposed to, the longer she refuses to be entertained by T.V. and the radio, the more she starts to act out. 

Most nights, she climbs up to her bed with Ms. Notting’s screeches still ringing in her ears, wiping spittle from her cheeks and scowling at the snide giggles of the older girls echoing from where they are listening in on the hallway. The shadows of the orphanage loom larger than life, and Kate takes every darkened day and learns to breathe around it.

Her world feels broken. Fractured. The sun is no longer a spotlight but a microscope, zooming in on all her faults and flaws, highlighting all the things in her life that she cannot depend on, all the empty spaces that should have been filled with kindness and love, and instead are filled with anger and hate and some twisted sort of fear.

Kate grows up here, and she learns to live with it. She learns to breathe, her eyes sharp and her smile sharper. There is something fragile to her existence, trying to find her balance in a house made of broken shards, but she takes this shattered glass and makes it into a shield. She takes this shattered glass and makes it into windchimes, lets their tinkling music fill her with something like peace.

She runs, away from bullies, away from the people who should have been there to take care of her, away from the pain and sorrow hiding inside of her own mind. She smiles, because she knows that her hands are small and the world is not clay made to be moulded, because there is so little she can change and so little she can control, but facing these barren, broken truths with a grin is well within her power, and she clings to it. 

And inside of her, the anger simmers, filling up her lungs.

Inhale. Exhale. Push it  _ down, down, down- _

The circus is a stroke of luck. 

The only reason they even go is because the entire orphanage has been given an open invitation for one free night. Ms. Notting has them all dress in their best clothes, and there is an excited gaggle of children approaching the big top, all of them chatting and giggling and utterly enchanted by the lights and smells and sounds.

Kate stays ahead of the group and to the side, silent but her eyes wide, wide, wide. When a clown offers a balloon animal, she takes it into her hands and beams up at him, feeling something inside of her balloon up as well, something like joy.

They go. They watch the show. Kate sits on the edge of her seat as the tremulous feats of danger and daring take her breath away. The spotlights are flaring, painting the air brilliant reds and blues and golds. The performers look like they are flying. They look like they’re catching the sun.

The others see a fun performance, an ordinary night out of town. Kate sees her chance to escape.

_ If you want something, the only person you can truly rely on is yourself. _ This is the lesson life has been teaching her ever since she was left at the orphanage, weeping and grasping with tiny hands left without someone to hold. She’s seven years old and she knows nothing is easy, nothing is free, that it’s all hard work and grit and perseverance.

If you can't keep up, you'll be left behind.

But Kate  _ can  _ keep up. She's tough. She's strong. She takes every moment of her day and makes it useful, makes it her own. The world is not made of clay but there is still power in the curls of her palms and she will cling to it in every way she can.

Sometimes, that means painting alternate realities in your head, just to give yourself a chance to breathe. 

Sometimes, that means running away to the circus.

So afterwards, before Ms Notting pinches her by the ear and ushers her away, Kate slips into the crowd and finds one of the performers, the strongman.

"Do you think," she asks, eyes and smile just this side of too sharp, their fragments hidden in the flashing lights, "I could work for the circus?"

The man laughs and grins, a mountain of a human being in comparison to the small child before him, and winks. "Us circus folks are always looking for people to join our family!" he booms.

He's thinking about the future, about a decade from now when she will be grown, about how this child will probably not even remember this conversation by the time she's a young woman. He's thinking about this long, slow passage of time.

Kate's thinking about next week.

She grins, does five cartwheels in a row, and whoops loudly for anyone to hear. The circus performers laugh and applaud at the display, and Kate cradles something small and tentative in her chest that feels a little bit like hope, even as she takes a bow.

Four nights later, a small figure scales down the side of the orphanage in the dead of night, feet finding tentative footholds in crumbling brick and climbing ivy. The train pulls into the station for refueling at roughly midnight before rushing away, rattling the window panes of the old building, the occupants sleeping obliviously on. 

On the opposite end of the tracks, a little girl breathes in the dark. She’s got a backpack thrown over her shoulder, filled with a few freshly made sandwiches and an all important map, blocking out the planned stops the travelling circus is going to perform. The dates are highlighted in yellow, throwing out small cartoon stars.

As the train starts off once more, heaving steam and chuffing smoke, small feet take off in a sprint alongside it. She stumbles, once, twice, before finding her stride.

No one notices when the train leaves with one more passenger than it stopped with.

It’s about escape. It’s about control. Kate leaves behind a broken reality and runs away to something brighter. It doesn’t feel like victory- there is no such thing as victory- but it is not a loss, either. 

If the world will not give her gentle truths she will seek them out. If the world will not give her kindnesses, she will build them.

Her hands are small, not powerless. She pulls her own weight. 

Distraction is key. Kate runs away again and again and again until they agree to keep her, and she proves herself useful, and she throws herself full heartedly into absolutely everything she can get her hands on.

She lives.

And when she has done everything,  _ everything, _ the circus has to offer, when she sees an advertisement in the newspaper offering something new, she goes.

* * *

_ Kate paces their bedroom floor. Back and forth. Back and forth. _

_Well. Not_ their _bedroom floor. Not anymore._

_ Constance’s bedroom floor, she supposes. It’s a strange concept. Kate frets about how quickly the place is going to become a massive mess when she leaves, but only because it is easier than fretting about other, bigger things. _

_ She’s leaving. They’re all leaving. It’s an ending, the closure of the most terrifying and most loved years of her life, and she doesn’t know what to do with it.  _

_ What  _ can _ you do with this? _

_ The door slams open, and Kate startles, looks up. Constance stares petulantly at her, arms crossed against her tiny chest. She looks like a troll, red face and watery blue eyes. She looks like a child. _

_ “Stop worrying. You’re giving me a headache.” _

_ “Do you need me to get Mr. Benedict?” The question slips out of her mouth all too easily, because Kate doesn’t want to address the first part of the little girl’s claim, and searching for Mr. Benedict, at the very least, would be something to do. _

_ Productive. She likes being productive. _

_ “Stop avoiding the subject.” _

_ No five year old should have mastered rolling their eyes so thoroughly. Kate, for her part, just smiles, sits on the bed. She’s going to miss this kid. _

_ “Sorry, Connie girl.” _

_ And they fall into silence. Both of them have things to say, but their words are being swallowed up by the space, by the memories tucked into the crevices. It’s the end of an era and it’s the start of something new. Bittersweet flavoring on their tongues. _

_ Kate has run away before. She left everything behind and never looked back, not once. She wonders if it’s the same for her friends. If this section of their lives is some sort of bitter, broken truth they will turn away from, breaking all ties. _

_ She doesn’t think so, and yet, and yet, and  _ yet-

_ As if reading her thoughts- and with Constance, it is always a possibility- the little girl besides her roughly reaches out, jams her small hand into Kate’s large one. There is a weight to this, a message.  _

I’m here _ , those little fingers say, clammy and sticky and holding on tight,  _ I’m here.

_ Kate breathes. She squeezes back.  _

And I am here with you.

* * *

Kate is twelve years old and she is alone.

Well-

Sort of alone. There are chores. And chickens. And letters coming in and out of a broken down farm. Moocho is bound to arrive any day now. 

But yes. Alone. 

What a strange thing to feel. Almost nostalgic, but bad.

She breathes.

The barn had been gutted, when they had first arrived. Gutted and empty, and she had wanted to weep. Had smiled instead and started pointing out things they could fix up, things they could improve. There is a window overlooking the courtyard, and she imagines reinforcing old beams, the smell of hay, the world better than what it is made of before her. Milligan had laughed, had smiled, and there was something tentative between them, something fragile. 

Kate is clumsy with love, but not for lack of trying. It overwhelms her, sometimes, the amount of it she is capable of holding in her chest, even after so long.

And now she’s alone. 

Kate doesn’t like to sit with bad thoughts, doesn’t like to acknowledge any sort of weight on her broadening shoulders. But there is a weight, to this, a heaviness. In a perfect world, she would be happy. 

She has everything she has ever wanted.

She has her father back, she has friends, she has a compilation of adults who are kind and wonderful. She saved the day from evil and she did good. She did  _ good. _

Why, then, does she feel so lost? 

Kate goes to the mill, that first day.

She runs instead of taking her bike, toes jammed into her shoes and bucket bouncing against her hip. The dusty lane stretches out before her, plants slowly starting to take over the hard packed earth.

She has to ask for directions twice, and it feels wrong, almost. Once she was small and young and she knew this place like the back of her hand. 

(Smaller. Younger. This girl is hardly grown and growing still.)

She runs. She runs and it aches, even as her breath holds steady, and when she arrives at the place she shakes with it.

It's so much smaller then she thinks it should be.

The pond, the mill, the winding dirt paths. All of it. She wants it to be so much more than it is. It's so momentous in her mind, this place. It holds depths, aching memories and shattered scards of heartache. A source of all unanswered cries from that sobbing child who could hardly breathe around her own rage, her own grief.

Kate doesn't know why she's come here. She feels too old for her skin, too giant. She feels just as small and just as helpless as she had been all those years ago.

The mill stretches out before her, plain and small and simple. Her emotions bundle and yell and storm in her chest, her hands twitch for her bucket, her breath comes shallow.

A breeze filters across the pond. Kate wants to  _ scream. _

She wants it to be so much more and it's not, it's  _ not.  _ She wants answers, explanations, some sort of clue, some sort of  _ anything- _

There's nothing she can fight, here. Nothing she can beat and be done with. There are no simple answers and it is the hardest pill to swallow.

The mill is just a mill. 

And it's stupid. This is stupid. Why on earth did she come here?

Why?

Kate turns, feels off balance, feels misplaced. She runs.

Runs.

She's not sure if she's fleeing from the place or the question.

* * *

_ They are sitting at the dining room table, the late hour waning ever later.  _

_ Reynie’s eyes are reflective in the dark, deep brown seemingly taking in the light of the streetlamps outside and holding it. Kate huddles in on herself, sitting cross legged on the creaky, well-loved chair. _

_ She’s not sure what to do with this. The quiet. The exhaustion. Reynie has bags under his eyes, and her hands won’t stop shaking. She doesn’t think there is any etiquette for this, stumbling across your friend in the wee hours of the morning, still breathing out the night terrors that had crept into your throat during the night. _

_ Kate doesn’t know how to deal with a Reynie who isn’t trying his hardest to put his clever brain to use and solve a problem in front of him. So she sits, and wallows in the adrenaline that continues to thrum in her veins, the awkwardness.  _

_ She wonders if he doesn’t know how to deal with her when she isn’t smiling. When she is still. _

_ She wonders. _

_ Finally, after a minute or after an hour, Reynie lumbers to his feet. She thinks, for a moment, that he is going to go back to bed, but then he shuffles off into the kitchen. She hears the clunking of mugs coming out of the cupboards, the shuffling of ingredients in the pantry. _

_ A younger version of herself, she thinks, would have taken this as a chance to slip away. A younger version of herself wouldn't have let herself be caught. _

_ Kate is growing all the time.  _

_ Some ten minutes later, he’s back out again, holding two cups of steaming hot chocolate. He offers her a crooked grin and places the larger of the pair in front of her. She only realizes her hands are cold when she goes to take a sip and wraps her fingers around warm ceramic. _

_ “Kate,” Reynie says, very quiet, and she looks up at him. Waits. His eyes are still swallowing all the light in the room. “We’re going to be okay.” _

_ There is a surety in his voice, a steadiness, and despite it all she finds herself believing him. _

* * *

Kate is thirteen years old, and she knows the face of cruelty: it smells like expensive cologne and carries a briefcase.

Kate is thirteen years old and she is terrified. 

Not outwardly. Not loudly. This terror is quiet, held deep in her chest with her anger and her loss. It feels like a glove made out of lightning. It feels like exhaustion weighing on her bones, too many days and too many nights spent running. The weight of a ticking explosive in the palms of her hands, sweat beading in her hair as she sprints into open air.

(Sometimes, in her dreams, she throws the bomb and she doesn’t miss.)

It’s not safe. Nothing is safe and nothing is sacred, and Kate prowls empty hallways late at night in Mr. Benedict’s house, hidden away under lock and key and craving something more than these twisted, groaning walls. When she slips out of the room in the twilight hours, she does so silently.

Constance sleeps on like a log. She is not sure why she is not more grateful for it. 

There is a choice. There is always, always a choice. Kate ran away and swore  _ never again, never again.  _ Kate has been fighting for practically all the days of her life, and still the weight of fighting grown men twice her age and twice her size leaves her feeling sick and cold.

She shakes with it, sometimes. Presses her nails into her calves and shakes with it. Tastes bile in her mouth and swallows back down. McCracken smiles sickly sweet in the crevices of her mind and she hates it, she hates all the things she cannot control. The shaking and the hatred and the feel of his steel hands pressing too tight and too close.

(Sometimes, in her dreams, she throws the bomb and she doesn’t miss and she is  _ glad _ for it.)

Kate had fought like a wild thing, like a creature cornered and left with absolutely everything to lose, and she had still lost. When her friends needed her, when her father needed her, when everyone she loved most in this world was depending on her, she had failed. 

It  _ stings.  _

Running and running and running, all the days of her life, and still she wasn’t fast enough, still she wasn’t strong enough. She had made it to the deck in time, but it is a shallow comfort. She had thrown the wicked calculator into the sea and it had blown up and done nothing else. It had not taken Sticky’s scrapes and bruises away from him, or Number Two’s jittering anxiety, or the way Reynie had sat on her bunk yesterday, a book laid out in front of him entirely unread as he stared blankly ahead at absolutely nothing.

Kate stands outside Milligan’s room and does not go inside. Her fingers clench into tight fists and no matter how hard she tries, she cannot make them release. Cannot stop their trembling. 

She can hear her dad breathing, through the door. Those rattling, quiet breaths. She lost him once and she almost lost him again. Had to drag him down a mountain carrying that fear in her chest.

The Ten Men did this. Milligan is hurt because he was protecting her and her friends. Because Kate failed in protecting them. Because Kate failed in protecting herself.

A groan, echoing from the room. A shuffle.

The Ten Men did _ this. _

There is a storm raging inside of her and there was a choice made in a split second, a raging sort of anger swallowed by a mercy she had given and cannot quite bring herself to regret.

She wishes she could regret it.

It would have been easy. It would have been easy, to kill those wicked men with their own wicked contraption, and she had been tempted, for a moment, for several. 

She is thirteen years old and she already carries the weight of other people’s lives in her hands. It doesn’t feel like sunshine. It feels cold.

(She feels cold.)

They got away, and now Kate and her family are stuck, mice hiding away in their hole. Sometimes, in her dreams, Mr. Curtain leans forward, his eyes full of malice, and smiles.

_ We won,  _ his voice jeers, _ You lost. _

Small skin and small bones, and it’s not much but it’s what she has. She lost her faith in victory the first time she was pressed to the floor and felt the rising welts of scratches across her face, the spray of spittle on her cheek. The world won’t let her win and suddenly, terrifyingly, she realized that what she has to offer might not be enough to stop her from losing.

And she has so much more to lose, now. 

All this trembling sense of control, and she’s losing it. She’s losing it. Kate is trapped in her own skin and her life is spiraling all around her. She has been fending for herself for so very long.

Kate’s tired. She doesn’t know how to stop running. She can’t stop running.

She’s tired.

She breathes and doesn't cry. Tears have never helped her, not a single day of her life.

Sharp eyes and sharper smile. Kate went to the zoo, once, and watched a lioness powl up and down her tiny cage, metal bars and powerful muscles, all coiled up and ready to attack. She wonders if this is what it feels like. She imagines her teeth becoming fangs, her nails grown into claws.

All these emotions in her lungs. They simmer, and bubble and boil, filling her up, leaving no room for air-

Inhale. Exhale. Push it  _ down, down, down- _

Kate sits outside of her father’s bedroom and keeps watch. 

Come morning, she’ll be long gone.

* * *

_ A half finished game of chest in the corner of the room, a truly tumultuous pile of books in the other. Kate picks her way through papers and folders and novels, plays hopscotch with clear floor space and tries not to laugh. _

_ Some things, it seems, never change. _

_ One of those things is Mr. Benedict’s office, forever a mess of clutter and organized chaos. Another of those things is Mr. Benedict himself, who smiles at her with the same twinkling eyes he has always shown her. _

_ “My dear,” he says kindly, knowingly, “whatever may I help you with?” _

_ And Kate breathes, breathes. The room smells like tea and old books. It smells, funnily enough, like home. But, then again, she’s had many homes, throughout her life.  _

_ Perhaps it is not so surprising, after all. _

_ “I need something to do.” _

_ It’s not what she meant to ask, but nonetheless, it is true. Kate feels fidgety, tired. There is so much energy inside of her and she is going mad with it. There is so much of everything inside of her, and she needs something concrete to hold herself together. _

_ He is looking at her, Mr. Benedict. He is looking at her with sympathy, with gentleness. Her hands are fumbling with his grace. She wants to run. She wants to stay. _

_ “I have a book,” he says, and she blinks at him. “A manuscript, and I think you’d be the perfect first reader of my story.” _

_ “Wouldn’t Reynie be better? Or Sticky? Surely Rhonda would-” _

_ “No, Kate. You are wonderfully suited for this task. I would be honoured.” _

_ And so Kate is handed a collection of looseleaf paper, crammed with Mr. Benedict’s chicken scratch scrawl, held together by paper clips and sheer power of will. She sits herself down in a lotus position and begins to read, absentmindedly gnawing on the back of the pencil she’s been handed, tapping her finger against her knee.  _

_ It is the story of a little girl who takes on the world and comes out still singing. It is a story about kindnesses, and what you make of them. It is a story about living, and all the truths that exist inside of every last person, about the way they breathe.  _

_ Kate reads and marks her notes. For the first time in her life, she thinks, she takes her time, goes slowly. At a chair in his desk, Mr. Benedict begins to hum. _

* * *

Kate is fourteen years old, and she isn’t quite sure what to do with this sense of victory.

For days, for  _ days,  _ she rides the high of it. They won and it is infinitely more than what she has ever expected. She has been running all her life, and she thought that this would be a skill that would never grow out of use. Not ever.

And yet-

Here she is. It’s the end of something or another and she’s come out of it still breathing.

They won.

She doesn’t know how to carry this weight. She doesn’t know what to do with this joy in her chest, this future laying itself out before her, the horizon stretching on and on and on. 

They  _ won. _

History repeats itself. It repeats. Kate is four years old and she is trying to find something new in the crevices of her tear soaked pillow. Kate is seven, and she is leaving a broken reality behind her. Kate is twelve, staring at the hallowed grounds of her memory and finding no answers. Kate is thirteen, and there is a choice, and she must make it.

Kate is fourteen. This girl is hardly grown and growing still.

How do you put down your weapons, once the war is over? How do you learn to breathe again, when your lungs have been drowning in rage for so long? How do you take the world as it is, with all its broken truths and quiet beauties, and live with it?

There is grass on her face and a small hand in her hand. Quiet whispers in the dark and a story at her fingertips, meaning so much more than the humble paper it is written on.

Kate has lived, all the days of her long-short life. She has made her miseries into shields, has taken shattered glass and made it into windchimes. She has done it on her own.

But this loneliness, this loneliness is no longer compatible with her narrative. It hasn’t been for a while, for years, ever since she took a test for extraordinary children and made it through. It’s just taken her this long to see it.

Kate is fourteen years old and she is sitting on the couch with Milligan besides her. They had found the photo album in the attic, miraculously intact besides the copious amounts of dust pressed into its pages. There is a child smiling up at her, beaming beyond the scope of memory, moments captured in a photograph that she can never go back to.

Milligan and Kate, eating ice cream on a bench, her face covered in chocolate. Kate, at a playground, caught mid swing, her tiny feet trying to touch the tree tops. Milligan and Kate, picking apples in the orchard, making silly expressions. A blurry, out of focus and off centered picture of her father giving a thumbs up, one she must have taken herself. Milligan and Kate, in the barn, laughing.

Milligan and Kate, at the mill. The sun is shining and it is beautiful.

She had this, once. 

She lost this, too. 

For years, this could have been hers, and it was taken from her.

It was  _ taken  _ from  _ her. _

She doesn’t realize her eyes are wet until the photographs before her start blurring beyond decipherability. She doesn’t realize she’s started to cry until Milligan starts hushing her, shoving the photo album aside in favour of pulling her close, holding her tight.

The tears start going and they don’t  _ stop,  _ just falling and falling and falling. They are not heartfelt sobs, loud and wailing for all the world to hear. They are near silent, stuttering hiccups in her chest, shaky and silent and tensed all over. This is not a body that knows how to cry. The tears still keep rising up and being blinked away and rising up again.

It’s humiliating. It’s humiliating and awful and it’s a relief.

It’s a relief.

“I was  _ alone,” _ she hisses, and even though the words are catching in her throat he must understand her because Milligan just squeezes like he could take back every ounce of pain, if he just loved her hard enough. 

Tears and words and rage. They are climbing out of her, pulling and tugging at her tongue, at her throat. She’s drowning. She’s relearning to breathe.

“I was alone for, for  _ years  _ and you weren’t  _ there. _ I had to take care of myself and no-one, no-one was ever  _ there-” _

“Shh, shh, I know, I’m sorry, I know-”

“And even when- when you were back. I just? I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, I thought. I thought I had to- to take care of myself. To take care of you. To take care of  _ everyone,  _ and-”

Kate protects. It’s what she does. She’s the fighter of their little group, and she takes pride in this, in this trust and faith placed on her shoulders. A lifetime of fending for herself and she knows how to carry this responsibility. 

That responsibility can hold such heavy burdens.

_ My fault,  _ she had thought, when they were captured.  _ My fault,  _ she had thought, when Constance looked like she could cry from exhaustion and sickness.  _ My fault,  _ she had thought, when the silver glove reached out and Reynie  _ screamed.  _

_ My fault, my fault, my fault- _

It took this man throwing himself off a building for her, in order to realize that this sort of love is more than a one way street. Milligan holds her so close now, and there is so much grief inside of her, and it is so heavy, and she is letting it go.

She is letting it go.

_ “Shh,” _ her father is whispering in her ear,  _ “shh,  _ I have you now, I have you.”

Kate breathes.

Tears have never helped her. Not a single day in her life. 

But tears are for the living, and she is alive. The bars of the cage are bent and broken, a lioness released.  _ This _ is release.

Inhale, exhale, and the emotions rise, up and up and up and out. Into the open air.

* * *

The sun is shining, and they are at the mill.

Constance is yelling, in the water, clinging to Rhonda with a death grip and refusing to let go despite the floaties on her arm. Her new bright red bathing suit has tiny little sequins on them, catching the light and reflecting it across the lake. Earlier, Sticky had been talking about it, digging into the science behind it all, but now he has been thoroughly distracted. Mr. Benedict and Ms. Perumal have entered a friendly sandcastle building contest, frantically trying to outdo one another despite the lack of available tools, and the rather poor quality sand.

It’s hilarious. Sticky is looking back and forth between the two sand creations, peering as carefully as he would have been looking if he had been a real judge. The grownup Washingtons have long since joined Number Two in her kingdom of shady umbrellas, copious picnic baskets, and stacks of books. Occasionally, however, they send fond looks their son’s way.

By the water’s edge, on the tiny pier she had built as a summer project a month or so ago, Reynie is talking in easy Tamil with Mrs. Perumal, occasionally backtracking and repeating himself in a louder voice when she misses out on a word or two.

Kate eats her sandwich and watches. Tiny little dandelions are poking their yellow heads up through the ground, tickling her toes. In an hour or so, Moocho will arrive with pie and lemonade, and hopefully give her the rundown on how his date had gone with Yifan, a very kindly man who had recently taken over the librarian position in town.

Milligan’s shadow approaches from behind, plopping down besides her, warm and steady. She leans against his shoulder and continues to chew, enjoying how the breeze causes ripples through the water, through the grass.

“We should do this again, sometime,” she says, and there is something heavy to it, something light. “Come to the mill, again.”

He takes her free hand, squeezes it. 

Both of them have calluses. Both of them have scars.

“I promise, Katie Cat.” 

(History _ doesn't _ repeat itself, not really. Kate as she is now is different from who she once was, even if sometimes she feels just as lost, just as scared, just as young. But even if it does not repeat, it echoes.)

The molten gold of the day dipping into dusk is warm against her back, painting the world in warmth, in an almost golden hue. Across the way, Constance has managed to drag Sticky away from the sandcastles, clinging to his neck as he wades into deeper water, stubby little legs wrapped around his waist. They are making their slow way to the pier, talking about something Kate can’t quite catch.

She breathes.

This is not a fairytale, where the great evil is defeated and everyone gets to go home and be eternally happy. This is the truth. This is life. She carries it in the palms of her hands and plants it inside her chest.

There are bad nights and there are good nights: broken truths and quiet beauties, grey boundaries and exuberant leaps of faith. The world is not made of kindnesses but it is  _ hers, _ and for every loss she has ever experienced she has found so much more.

“Kate!”

Reynie is waving at her, down on boarded planks she had put together with her own hands. Small skin and small bones, but never powerless.

Not now. Not with this light growing and thriving inside of her, with her family at her side. The future seems, suddenly, an endless scope of possibilities, an endless horizon stretching out before her. 

There’s a splash as Reynie jumps into the water, sending a wave onto a sputtering Constance and Sticky, who loudly complain. She hears Rhonda’s sharp bark of laughter, Mr. Benedict’s dolphin peal of chortles.

“Shall we join them?” her father asks, all scarred tan and brilliant smile. He is already lumbering to his feet. Kate swallows the rest of her sandwich and stands to join him.

The minute she’s upright, Milligan takes off running.

“Race you there!”

Kate grins. She has been running all her life: from fear, for anger, towards safety.

This time, she runs, but only for her. Only for this, for the sheer fun of it. Because she is young. Because she has time.

She sprints down that great expanse, the grass whipping past her, the wind ruffling her hair. It feels like freedom. It feels like home. 

She passes Milligan, flyaway blond hair and some fancy footwork. Behind her, she hears his shocked exclamation, followed by a warm, brilliant chuckle and the way he puts on a burst of speed.

Kate runs faster, faster. The grass gives way to wood, steady panels beneath her feet. Constance, Sticky, and Reynie are waiting for her at the end, cheering her on, calling her name. This joy bubbles up inside of her and she lets it sing free, rising up in giggles and shouts. 

Maybe that’s what laughter is: joy that can’t be contained in your chest, joy so big and bright it just has to be heard.

Kate leaps. Her hand reaches up, up, higher and higher and higher. For one perfect, shining moment, she feels her fingers capture the sun.


End file.
